Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday January 02, 2010 @08:16AM
from the relegated-to-the-trunk dept.

tcd004 writes "In the PBS NewsHour's roundup of the biggest science news of the year, Neil DeGrasse Tyson dropped this doozie: '[Scientific leadership] drives the economic strength and security of nations. The fall is not from a cliff. More like a slow, downward slide — almost imperceptible from day to day. But as the years pass America will have descended from leaders to players to merely followers as we fade to insignificance, at best hitching a ride on the innovations of others.'"

The USA has a population of around 300,000,000, or around 5% of the world population. It should expect to be following in some areas. In the twentieth century, a combination of factors (less damage from WWII than other developed nations, higher ratio of middle class to subsistence-level citizens, greater economies of scale that most of Europe) let the USA lead in technology. Even then, a number of key developments came from outside the USA, for example the first theoretical models in computing, the first stored program computer, the most successful commercial CPU architecture and the TFT display all came from the UK, the first (and, so far, only) supersonic passenger aircraft was a joint venture between the UK and France.

With 5% of the world population, you simply can't expect to be the world leader at everything. Through most of the twentieth century, the USA operated quite a successful brain drain, skimming off a lot of the best and brightest in the rest of the world by offering them bigger salaries and, more importantly, a lot more resources to continue their work. Now it's quite difficult for someone with a PhD to get a visa to work in the USA (unless they're just transferring within the same multinational company) and the desire to work in America is significantly lowered by the insane anti-terror legislation, not to mention the crippling IP laws which make the USA a much less attractive place to do research unless you have a massive company backing you.

I was going to mention the suppression of innovation through patents, but I hadn't considered how hard it is for people to get here if they want to come. So even highly skilled can't get here because they could be terrorists or they could take a job. I like your analysis of brain drain. I hadn't really thought of that before but it makes perfect sense to me.

Considering that millions of illiterate and non-English speaking people get into the U.S. every year without valid papers, you would think that all these PhDs would be able to figure out how to do it too.

You might think that, if you thought people with PhDs would put up with getting paid under the table, having to carry fake IDs, going without access to even the US's meager social safety net, and living in fear of being deported.

It's one thing to put up with those conditions when you're coming from some poor, broken country. But why would an educated person from a developed country come here to live as a second-class citizen when he could stay home, do the same work above board, and enjoy his single-payer health care and 4 weeks of vacation?

Try to keep up with the thread, please. We're not talking about poor immigrants hoping to give their kids a better life in the land of opportunity.

We're talking about people who already have a post-graduate education and are looking for a career in scientific research. They didn't spend all that time in school just so they could sneak into the US in the back of a truck, try to find some research position that pays cash and doesn't ask too many questions, and keep their heads down to avoid being discovered b

It has always amazed me how debates about immigration to the US are almost always about illegal immigration. As these posts indicate, the American legal immigration system is thoroughly broken. It is mind-bogglingly stupid that America's universities attract the best and the brightest from around the world to get BS and PhD degrees, but then the USCIS sends them away as they can often not get a work visa to continue to live in the US! The only way the US can continue to lead the world is to continue to enco

Oh, it's not hard to get into the US illegally. But then you can't really work in a field where you might eventually be exposed to public scrunity. Like, say, research where you might one day want to participate in the Nobel Prize raffle.

Let's be honest here: Scientists not only want to research, they also want to show off like everyone. And their showing off is, by the very definition of their trade, very, very public. They also consider working in sweatshop labour places and being paid under the table ben

Now it's quite difficult for someone with a PhD to get a visa to work in the USA (unless they're just transferring within the same multinational company) and the desire to work in America is significantly lowered by the insane anti-terror legislation,

It's sad really, the most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism [wikipedia.org] are the exact same rabid supporters of the policies that are destroying it.

That's generally how that works. Arrogance and ignorance tend to go hand in hand and it's difficult under even the best of circumstances to stay the leader forever. But in this case with a sizable portion of the population that doesn't want to be educated it's difficult indeed to remain the leader. Coddling religious idiots need to believe in absurdities like virgin births, new Earth and ID is hardly the path to enlightenment. Not to mention more easily dispatched notions like the US as a Christian nation,

Glenn Beck is rabidly isolationist and a major terror-monger - precisely the kind of attitudes that have produced the massive headache for foreign engineering and science students to come to the USA and foreign engineers and scientists to work in the USA. Hence the proving my assertion that the most heavily jingoist are also the biggest contributors to our country's loss of prestige.

The rest of your response is such a ridiculously knee jerk paranoiac ranting that all it does is reinforce just about every stereotype you are trying to dispute. And for the record, I have never voted for a democrat or green or any other left-leaning party in my life, so your attempt to characterize me as part of the 'Left' cracks me up.

I don't think it's a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with Mr. Beck's political views. The problem lies in discerning what those views actually are.

I've never actually watched Mr. Beck or listened to his radio show. I've only ever seen him on The Daily Show where he is shown doing paid commercials for gold vendors, and also doing unpaid promotion for it on his Fox News show. Or where he says that Mr. Obama is a racist who hates white people and then 45s later says he's not saying that Mr. Obama hates white people. Or the topper - Mr. Beck emerged from the hospital with nothing good to say about the health care industry "In this country, trying to get well could actually kill you" and then moved from CNN to Fox and now has only good things to say about the health care industry. "We already have the greatest health care in the world, and we're going to lose it if the government gets involved," things of that nature.

It seems from all this that Mr. Beck's opinion is for sale. I don't know how one would go about determining if he was promoting things in good faith or not. I welcome any references you can provide that can correct my image of him.

He is, after all, welcome to believe whatever he wants, and to say whatever he believes on TV. In fact, he's welcome to say whatever someone pays him to say on TV, but blurring the lines between honest opinion and paid opinion destroys credibility.

My Premise: Those who believe in A are the strongest supporters of policies that destroy A.AC's Rebuttal: Not true, see book B praising A.My Repsone: Z is apparently a huge fan of book B and he's a huge supporter of polices that destroy A, ergo AC has just brought to light that Z fits my premise to a T.

Do you now understand why the association fallacy has nothing to do with my point?

The population ratio would probably be roughly equivalent in the last few decades yet US and a few other "rich" countries were able to maintain their scientific lead in the past. The point here is not that we expect the US to be the leader of everything but that there seems to be a large drop off in scientific/research investment in the last decade. We also see a drop in the quality of education (i.e. why are we still arguing about evolution in 20XX) standards and that will have a long term effect.

It is fear that will be the downfall of our "Home of the Brave". Fear that our kids will not believe in a god if they are taught evolution, fear that they will blow us up if they are taught chemistry, and fear that they will "steal" songs if they are taught math.

And yes, fear is the downfall of the US. And many other countries. We (including the US, most of Europe and a lot of other so called developed nations) are so terribly afraid of losing what we got that we don't dare to risk going ahead.

Just recently I saw a good documentary explaining why God plays such a huge role in a country that (IIRC as the first) separated church and state. The riots of the 70s were blamed on the godlessness and hedonism of the period, and people were terrified by those riots. The religious right gained a lot of steam in these days and they still got it today. And, when I look around me and ponder what people are the most "God fearing", I notice that the age bracket matches quite nicely.

My only hope is that time will cure it. People tend to forget, and those that refuse to forget will die, and we will eventually get more people relying on logic and reason again. I hope it won't be too late.

I respectfully disagree. I think that the more "religious" we are the more scientific progress we will have. I'm not talking about middle age religions that were often quite oppressive and distrusting of science (although, religious persecution of scientific progress and scientists has been exaggerated - they were only oppressive in some countries and of some scientists in specific fields); we have much different religions now than we had then.

I'm from Europe. And yes, people are quite religious here. Some even participate in mass every Sunday. Hey, we even have mandatory religion classes in school!

Yet, funny enough, the idea of creationism never really occured to anyone. Well, ok, there might be a handful of people, but the second a politician would seriously try to push it he may as well kiss his career good bye. We consider science and religion distinct matters. It seems our religious are quite capable to believe in their God and at the same t

It's not. But blind faith is anti-logic and anti-reason, and most religions tend to emphasize that faith is a virtue. There's an element of faith in science too, because no one is going to replicate every experiment to verify it; they're going to trust that the experimenters were honest and didn't make mistakes. But someone will try to verify it, and then you have a higher probability of correctness.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

does seem to hold a deeper truth about the tendencies of human society in general. Fear makes people go to great and horrible lengths to preserve their own safety and ideals; even so far as to destroy said ideals and safety in the process.

I agree education has much to do with it, as does mainstream media, and even school itself.

Think back when you were in high school and didn't really know what you wanted to do the rest of your life, which sounds better? Rock star, actor or actress, sports figure, or research scientist.

Given those choices the last I would pick would be research scientist. We are a nation of 'me's, what will it get me, how much will it earn me. Upon reflection now, I think it would be way cooler to be a research scientist,

Not being a leader in some field of scientific endeavor is okay. That the Germans produce better machine tools than the Americans is okay. They do what they can do well. We do what we can do well. Free trade between 2 free markets -- USA and Germany -- gives each country access to the products of the other country and enriches both countries in the process. That situation is the very basis of the economic law of comparative advantage.

While I think there is rampant abuse of the H1-B program I do think it is vital a U.S. dominance in all technological fields. Through-out the 30's and 40's we were not pulling just highly educated people from other countries, we were pulling in rockstars of science, people that could contribute the science we were trying to develop. Today H1-Bs are just a form of cheaper labor for companies and you don't have to be especially well qualified to land a job using an H1-B. Because of this our job pool is diluted and all the effort bringing people here yields very little.

The best and brightest minds are naturally going to be in other countries as we hold merely 5% of the population. H1-B needs to be about bringing in the best and the brightest, not about filling non-existent programmer position voids. Foreigners helped us construct the atomic bomb among many other technological leaps forward. They are necessary. The fact that Japan is so successful right now is due to us being lazy and let's face it, science was manipulated for political gains through the new millennium. When we recover our strengths you'll see us surpass Japan unless they too start bringing in foreign talent.

Of course you might remember that Japan was in a similar position to the U.S. now about a decade ago. They shifted their priorities and surprise surprise, they are back to being productive members of the international community. Right now people in the U.S. take their success for granted and have forgotten that it was only achieved through lots of hard work and lots of sacrifice! My own feelings lean towards suggesting that the religious awakening since 9/11 has been the root cause due to people living in fear searching for a quick fix rather than fixing the root of the problems at hand. It's easy to say god will save us, hard to actually do it yourself and stop the international sale of arms to unstable regions and stop the acquisition of oil from countries that behave unconscionably. All solutions come with sacrifice and there would be serious humanitarian issues to deal with although I suspect China would fill any economic gaps for those countries we stopped buying from. At some point we have to accept higher gas prices as a cost of our ideals which are just and sound if only we had the balls to live up to them.

Here is the conclusion: H-1B engineers were never necessary to the American economy.

H-1B engineers are necessary to suppress wages, which is necessary to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. That's commonly known as "right-wing" politics, which have been practiced at least since Reagan's time, for the detriment of almost all.

To have a good domestic workforce, you have to train good domestic engineers. It is actually that simple.

Ever seen a Japanese school from the inside? Try to discuss the idea of "no child left behind" with a person from Japan and watch closely how he tries to retain his proverbial composure. Japanese schools don't level the field, they demand.

You say that the Japanese system of a reliance on domestic engineers is good and should be applied to the US. I say, to do that you first of all have to create engineers that are on par with Japan. Then we can talk.

The Japanese are a few years behind... but they are suffering the same fate as the Americans.Young Japanese (on mass) do not find science and engineering all that interesting anymore and they aren't willing to sacrifice to just do it as a job.

There's also the salary curve. As your society gets more services and regulations, there are 'easier' ways to make money, you can be a financial person, a doctor, lawyer, public sector worker, transit worker... Your best and brightest go into those areas.

Contrast this with say H1Bs. Now you get the best of the best from other countries where the pay/work vastly exceeds anything they could earn in other industries.

That said, the need for H1Bs is simply not that useful these days. If a company wants to make use of foreign labor, they could just setup a foreign branch:P

>>They are, but perhaps they wouldn't have been if there was sufficient (in price as well as quantity) homegrown talent.Fixed that for you. H-1B's are there to lower expected wage for engineers by increasing the pool, not to replace any shortage.

The US received a massive advantage in that all three other historical power centers (Europe, Russia, China) were crippled by massive dictatorships at roughly the same time. Half a century later, it is not surprising the relations should balance out somewhat.

For decades, many of the world's best students came to the US to get their PhDs. In many American labs you could hardly meet a native American scientist. And American science thrived, really. Maybe now it's time for the US to send their best students abroad and get valuable PhDs from countries where you can still find a taste for hard work and good science?

A lot of people still go to the USA to get their PhDs, but over the last few years the rules have changed to make it much harder for them to get a work visa afterwards. It used to be a quite easy way of getting into the country; go for a PhD, get it, and then stay. Now you're educating people to a high standard and then sending them back to their original homes, and then wondering why there are so many excellent foreign research centres...

And this is exactly the attitude that is causing America to be slipping. Don't educate the best and brightest, educate the best from the 5% who happen to be born in the USA. Don't encourage the best and brightest to come to America and make it a better place, pick from the 5% who happen to be born in the USA. If you want America to regain the place it had in the middle of the twentieth century, you need to make it an attractive place for the top foreigners to relocate to. Stop importing people to fill up jobs at the bottom and middle, and start importing world leaders again.

Or would you rather that people like Einstein and Von Braun had gone somewhere else and their jobs been taking by Real Americans(tm)? The world stage would probably look very different if that had happened...

Maybe now it's time for the US to send their best students abroad and get valuable PhDs from countries where you can still find a taste for hard work and good science?

No, America has a high quality (but very expensive) post-secondary education system. Being expensive means that some bright but less fortunate students will never reach their full potential - which is sad but it is still provides a quality education. The real problem with America is the public education system. Low standards combined with parents that don't get involved result in very few American students good enough to attend post-secondary education. So good students are imported.

For some time now, America has operated their "brain drain" to attract the best from other countries. Take Canada for example (I am Canadian). American jobs generally offer higher wages and result in lower taxes. This is partly because tuition in Canada is subsidized - I only paid ~$2000 a semester. So I can graduate from Canada with very low dept and then move to America to work. This is great for both me and America as America does not have to pay for my training. It is bad for the Canadians that do pay for my training and for the Americans I am competing against that do not have the option of a low cost education. But overall, this is good for America and is partly responsible for the lead America had in R&D.

Others have discussed some reasons why this American "brain drain" is starting to fail - and I agree with them. For example, I have no desire to work in the US. I don't even want to travel to the US - or through the US for that matter. I will gladly pay extra for flights that do not require a transfer in an American airport. It is sad because the Americans that I know who live here in Canada are amazing people. I love my American friends - but seriously America, what happened???

The brain drain to the US was always a double edged sword. Many people went to the US with the lure of higher wages and lower taxes, realized it wasn't really true, and left.

Taking Canada as an example, Albertans pay lower taxes than residents of many US states. Any remaining disparities in wages and taxes are easily swallowed up by all the extra fees, the biggest being health insurance, that you run into in the US.

A few years ago I was part of a group interviewing a prominent researcher from Cornell for a position at a Canadian university (he was originally Canadian, educated in Canada). His reasons for coming back were (1) excellent research opportunities in Canada, (2) inability to pay for a decent post secondary education for his children and (3) inability to pay for decent health care in the US as he and his wife got older.

Statistically, IIRC, the brain drain between Canada and the US reversed about a decade ago in most areas.

You can't just have PARC and places sitting in isolation, churning out whizz bang science.

Neither can you just build a PARC, and have that attract and create industry around it.

PARC and places like that need to co-exist with a hotbed industrial base, and then you get a positive feedback loop.

If you kill local industry and manufacture, then you also kill science.

If you kill science, then you also kill local industry and manufacture.

Back in the 1960's and before every school in the UK turned out kids who could read, write, and do math.

You cannot do ANY trade without these skills, not plumbing, not carpentry, not bricklaying, not to mention the slightly higher level trades like boilermakers etc.

Sadly, we threw it all away, in our pursuit of crap courses like equine aromatherapy and womyns studies, anything, just to get more people in university, just to get more people with degrees and diplomas and certificates.

Now we have a "service" economy that relies on someone else being able to do the basic math etc.

I am an engineer ( a proper one, eg mechanical and marine) and sadly I am the demographic that went through the trade at a time when an engineer was lower in status and pay than many blue collar jobs, which meant no-one wanted to do apprenticeships, which means I am one of the last of the "old school" of engineers.

The future isn't bright.

Sci-fi series Firefly had one thing right, learn a second language, and make it Chinese.

Even if we turned around and went balls out to fix the problem, money no expense, NOW, it would take a generation, or 20 years, to fix, which is too damn slow to work.

All that is left is importing the talent.

From what I know of the USA, there is a lot of importing engineering talent going on, lots of foreign nationals, green card holders and immigrants working in tech.

A friend of mine summed it up well years ago, when he said that in 2020 the USA will be the place to go to make cheap porn and exploit people who don't have any other options.

US may be taking a back seat in science, but what is described in the article has nothing to do with that.

Russian space agency needs money very much like NASA. The proposal to shoot down an asteroid (which, according to recent calculations is not an imminent threat) is made primarily to raise their profile, and perhaps get some cash. It certainly helps that the cause is "you will die unless you pay". If you read the original russian announcement you'd notice that they "will need 100s of millions of dollars" and they hope US and European partners will bring some dough to the table:)

I am somewhat familiar with a state of Russian science, and while it may be that over countries are going ahead of US - Russia is not one of them. Real science in Russia is, unfortunately, taking a backseat to populist crackpottery (such as controlling the clouds or making machines that cure all diseases with "magnetism" and other such things bordering on mysticism) that is in style with the new rich, who are ready to pay for it.

BTW. Alexa claims only about 47.1% of us here at/. are from US. I'm unsure how representative Alexa is for global stats (global rankings rarely are), but the rest of the world'd be sooner underrepresented than not.

I think other areas are the cause. You don't see China or India leading the world with billions of dollars of research on how life began (because it really isn't a priority). Creation vs evolution doesn't affect chemistry, physics, or 90% of biology. I know several very smart and productive hard science PhDs who espouse creationist viewpoints; somehow it doesn't affect their work (they obviously don't work in evolutionary biology though).

The Creation Museum is a symptom, like Sarah Palin, etc., of a country that takes stupid way too seriously and discounts intelligence, intellect and expertise as "elitist". Young earth creationist nutballs are harmless as long as they don't try to teach it as science or history or whatever. Because when you're trying to discern the laws of nature, predict future natural phenomena and exploit these for technological purposes, "God did it" is not a very good starting point.

The Creation Museum is trying to get dinosaurs with saddles taken seriously as science. They are trying in general to get taken seriously as science. Check out their website, reviews of the museum, people's impressions and photo journals of it to see just what we're writing about. Seriously, take a look -- it's way wackier than you might think, much more loony than your creationist PhD friends, who are probably otherwise normal and would never suggest that Noah's Ark is literal history and the dinosaurs came along for the ride.

Disruption is the essence of progress. Some of what was is superseded by something new. Typically the incumbent technologies and powers either fight progress tooth and nail, try to co-opt it, or try to at least manage it's pace to something they can control. When too much incumbent power is too successful at slowing progress, that progress tends to move somewhere else.

In recent years, those incumbent powers have been quite successful in the US. One can hope that that trend doesn't continue.

People mentioned the immigration policies and other factors, but I think the #1 reason long-term pursuits like science have faded from the forefront is the shift everywhere to short term thinking.

Students are staying away from science and math because of a short term (or maybe a long term) worry about employability. They also realize that law, medicine and MBA-type pursuits are much more lucrative if they're smart.

Companies are increasingly run by groups of investors who put intense pressure on boards to make the quarterly numbers any way possible. This kind of thinking can kill innovation at a company -- it's always wasier to license and resell someone else's product in the short term, but in the long term you're nothing but a middleman.

Universities are under even greater pressure to focus research on things that can be immediately turned into products or patents.

IBM, AT&T, HP, etc. have all cut back their research labs and divisions. That's not a total surprise; can you imagine trying to explain to some hedge fund guy who holds 10% of the company stock why he's spending money on research?

The general public is also caught up in the market driven short term thinking. Everyone depends on the stock market for their retirement. Now that they have instant access to it, volatility goes way up and the public is making the same demands as the hedge fund guys...make money for me NOW or you're fired!

Personally, I think we should deemphasize the amount of attention paid to the stock market, and give it back to the billionaire's club. Invest your retirement money in something safe that gives reasonable returns....ror better yet, demand that they bring pensions back (the ultimate long term planning tool.)

"Students are staying away from science and math because of a short term (or maybe a long term) worry about employability. They also realize that law, medicine and MBA-type pursuits are much more lucrative if they're smart."

I'd just like to point out that Medicine *is* science. To get a degree in medicine (whether as a nurse or doctor, or lab technician) you have to take all sort of chemistry, biology, and other science courses. All medical progress/research is science-driven. The part about law and MBA's i

You're right - I was referring to medicine as part of the professions. Medicine is science, but a lot of it is applied science instead of basic research. At least for now, it's also a very lucrative path if you have the talent and can deal with people and the insane amount of training you have to do.

Just as an example, if you were about to graduate with a 4.0 from MIT, you'd have options open to you. Medicine is one...8+ years of training, incredible amounts of work and debt, and a huge payoff at the end. L

It's a cultural thing. I am sure you have heard the following line in one movie or another, where the father laments his son's career choice: "You could have been a doctor or a lawyer!" This line is used so often it's almost a cliche, and that's no surprise: those professions, and increasingly the MBA-type stuff as well, are considered by many, many people as positions that come with wealth and respect. Conversely, engineers and scientists are notoriously lacking in respect from society at large. Students l

I was referring to Medicine as the entire field/industry of Medicine, not just MD.s. As you yourself state, a lot of PhDs are employed by biotech and pharma companies. Even doctors are trained in science, and effective use the scientific method every day. You may scoff at them as 'auto-mechanics', but even auto-mechanics, to a degree, employ the tools and techniques of science. As for MDs, as I pointed out, in order to practice, they need to learn a lot of science, even if they don't do 'research' day to da

Personally, I blame the MBA. As in the "Masters of Business Administration" degree.

The MBA programmes at all North American universities promote this short of short-term, quarter-by-quarter, stock price driven corporate culture. As the MBA increasingly became the price of entry to more lucrative salaries and promotion within an enterprise, that culture became all-pervasive, to the point where it is now the water in which the fish swim.

And along the way, the MBA-trained manager class forgot the hard-learned lessons of their founding fathers - like long-term planning, maintainence of corporate morale, and taking care of employees.

My career arc went military (I was a product of a military college) -> civvi -> military. The military is hardly a perfect institution, but one thing it really gets right is teaching leadership. Actual *leadership*, not just management.

One of the key tenets of leadership is that quality personnel who are properly motivated can overcome shortfalls in pretty much everything else. Crappy materials, shitty situation, odds stacked against you - well led troops can overcome these things and manufacture success.

And so there are a number of principles that go along with providing this kind of leadership: Lead by example. Ask your subordinates to do nothing you wouldn't do (or haven't done). Loyalty up starts with loyalty down. Respect is earned, not demanded. Always tell the truth, no matter how unpalatable it might be. If you have to correct someone (or you yourself are corrected) fix the problem and move on with no grudges. Provide subordinates with clear direction, including the mission to be accomplished and your intent, and then trust them to carry it out. Etc.

Yes, even in the military it is rare for all of these to gel in the same unit, and I can name commanders who I worked for/with who were deficient in one or more of these areas. But even the worst of them (and some could be pretty bad) were still better leaders and ultimately more effective than any MBA-trained manager I ever worked with as a civilian.

Having worked in a variety of civvie companies, ranging from small startups to major corporations (and most of my civvie experience was with US corporations) I've never seen so many people so completely oblivious to the effects of their decisions upon morale and the overall health and well being of their workforce. Decisions were routinely made with no consideration of second or third order effects. Corporate loyalty simply did not exist, with the employees in the trenches convinced (quite rightly) that management was out to screw them as hard as they could - and so it was OK then to screw the company as hard as they could.

And most frustratingly, any attempt to draw attention to problems in an attempt to get them rectified was usually perceived as an attack on the person who came up with the policy, not the policy itself. It was nearly impossible to pass ground truth up the chain because the bearer of bad news was treated as "difficult" and quite often punished or even terminated.

I wonder sometimes if the success of the "greatest generation" who fought in WW2 isn't because so many key people were exposed to military-style leadership and that sense of everybody in an enterprise pulling towards a common goal, and then that carrying on through the rest of their lives. Now, we get the short-sighted, numbers-focussed "leadership" of the MBA and the resulting destruction and misery.

I went back to the Army in large part because I couldn't take it any more. Even a bad day in the Army usually trumped a good day as a corporate wage slave.

Investment theory models treat corporations as if they were mathematical or perhaps physical entities - a mechanism, if you will.

That is not the case.

A corporation is a SOCIAL entity, because most of the moving parts are PEOPLE.

That means that there are second and third and umpty-ordinal effects of the model-driven first order effects because the model cannot predict how the employees will feel and react to decisions made in the company.

Any military commander will tell you that the most precious attribute o

The US is home to huge numbers of institutes, universities, and foundations that are directly responsible for TONS of science coming out. Matter of fact, I have a subscription to Science Magazine and many of the articles are in part or wholly by the US.

We are a bit behind in stem cell research training and skills, relative to other countries, but CIRM is working to catch that up.

Yeah, I kind of have to agree with the parent. I guess, honestly, I don't really know the state of U.S. science vs the rest of the world, but while I generally respect Dr. Tyson, his line of reasoning strikes me as a bit shallow. Basically, he says that because the Russian space agency is planning to try to deflect an Asteroid named Apophis so it has a reduced chance of colliding with Earth in a couple decades, and because CERN's LHC is currently leading theoretical particle physics, that the U.S.A. has fal

Exactly. If one instance of valuable science is to be attributed to a country, and then assumed to fully describe that country...

well... Yamanaka, the champion of induced pluripotent stem cells, now works for the US in SF.

IPSC are how current adults can get genetically identical stem cells. IPSC are how we can completely go around the 'ethical' disagreements from embryonic stem cells. IPSC are badass. This summer, whole mice were made from IPSC of tail tip skin.

Tyson made a very good point. In that lecture, he talked about the Islamic Empires of the 12th and 13th centuries that were building while we were in the Christian Dark Ages. Do you know what happened? A bunch of Imams got together and basically stated that Math and Science were of the devil. After that, it was only a matter of time. The result is the Middle East we see today.

He also stated a statistic that since Bush took office in 2001, during the 8 years of Bush, the amount of "hard science" Papers in Chemistry, Biology and Physics has dropped to 1/10th what it was in the 90s.

(He had exact numbers, and I saw this last November.)

The point is, Reactionary Christianity is causing the collapse of our civilization just the same way that Reactionary Islam caused the middle east to become what it is today.

Christianity. Its the Problem.

When you have 60% of your population denying Evolution, a scientific fact, your civilization is circling the drain.

I don't mind people believing in some sort of higher being or whatever floats their boat. But stay out of science with it! Science and religion don't mix well. Science is about doubting everything that's relayed to you, testing it and trying to find flaws in those theories, trying to find better theories, trying to improve on it. Religion gives you a text or other teachings that must not be questioned, that must not be doubted, that must not be tested, that has no flaws because it's holy and that you cannot improve because it's been taught by God or some other holy being.

Religion keeps things static. And while stability is a nice thing because it gives you something to work from, not being ALLOWED to work from it means you are standing still. No improvement. No progress. It's change that drives progress, and if you cannot change you cannot progress.

Get a copy of the the incoherence of philosophers by ghazali [wikipedia.org] and read it, you'll find gems like fire intrinsically has no capacity to burn - only through divine intervention does the burning effect occur

Go through a list of major scientific figures from the dark ages. They rapidly accelerate till around 1100AD followed by a sharp falloff. Science had all but stopped centuries (1300AD) before the renaissance began. Can't find anything better put together googling @ the moment but - this should give you an [muslimheritage.com]

Which religion are we talking about? Christianity? Environmentalism? Liberalism? Libertarianism, etc. My view is that current US politics seems to be trying all the ideological extremes with predictably bad results.

The USA does not, contrary to some believing it, have a monopoly on science and technology.

During the 1970's to 1990's the USA may have made some innovative computer technology and got the Apollo mission to the Moon and the Space Shuttle, but the rest of the world has caught up and in some ways passed us by.

Due to offshoring the work to foreign nations and not hiring enough scientists, engineers, and computer science US citizens in the USA, most of us had to take a job to pay the bills that does not contribute to science and technology. The jobs went to the lower bidders in India, China, Russia, etc instead. Labor goes to where labor costs are cheaper as per classic capitalism and even China has become capitalist. Minimum wage is welfare capitalism and classic capitalism does not use it. The USA has welfare capitalism which means we have welfare ie social programs backed by capitalism via insurance and that means unemployment, COBRA, medicare, disability, welfare, etc. We also force companies to get health insurance for their employees but foreign nations do not. Plus we tax corporations to pay for our welfare capitalism social programs so it also forces companies to move to foreign nations to avoid all that.

When I went to UMR I hung out with the foreign students from China and other places. They were so smart I would play pinball with them in the student lounge and they would win all of these free games because of mechanical engineering and they taught me some of the tricks of playing pinball and gave me their free games, in which I would win more free games and give them to another student. The best of the best from foreign nations come to the USA for college degrees and used to work in the USA, but now thanks to the Internet they can work in a foreign nation and turn out work for pennies on the dollar of what a US citizen wants to earn.

Massive offshoring, and importing of guest workers, has driven the salaries of many STEM workers below a living wage. US citizens are pushed aside to make room for the flood of offshore workers. Needless to say, this situation discourages Americans from pursuing a STEM career. Smart Americans are studying to go into finance, or something. If the US has not already lost it's technology edge, it soon will.

There are a number of factors as to why science is sliding, and it's not unique to the USA, most of the Western countries have this problem.

- In the UK, anyone on a science / engineering degree is sneered at; science, engineering and IT are SERIOUSLY uncool.- In the UK, it is cool to be a moron.- In the UK, there are no incentives for smart children to take up sciences (the government socially engineering moron population - easier to control).- In the UK, a degree in a useless subject like English, art, politics, history, Latin, drama, can get you on the career paths which can earn LOTS of money (ie. acting, banking, politics). How many rich people do you see that are engineers? The list rapidly runs out after Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ellison and a few others.- Education in sciences is not that great, many lecturers prefer the textbook approach and not enough practical skills.

But that's the education side. The other problem is people in the sciences of engineering come up with a new gadget or process, but then find out that they can't proceed because part of their idea has already been patented by Mega rich corp..

The decline in science and technology in America is enough to scare the hell out of me. The worst of it is that we can do nothing to fix it that the public would tolerate. Requirements for success by our school children would have to be drastic. American parents are in no way willing to put their kids through the kind of hell it takes to make competitive scholars. Some nations have genius scholars simply because extraordinary accomplishments are the only hope a young person has to avoid a living hell.

A lot of people here are talking about H1bs and the cost of education and one person even said the size of our population somehow correlates to a lack of amazing scientific progress. If that's true, India and China should have warp drives already.

Let's stop with the nonsense, especially with regard to immigrant workers.

While some companies do abuse H1bs it's not the cause of the decline of US scientific leadership, not even close! Einstein, Fermi, Godel et al were all foreigners! Please take the immigration debate elsewhere!

The realize the real root of the problem: culture. We have created a culture that loves to watch celebrities and make money. We have not instilled in our students the value of science education. And this should be seen as the biggest tragedy going into the second decade of the 21st century. People lack basic scientific literacy and they seems to be ok with not understanding a great many things. Just the other day I read about a high school that wanted to cut science labs [eastbayexpress.com] because too many white students were overachieving while the minority students were not. This should be obvious to anyone with common sense that this is absurd. Taking away resources from achieving students and directed them to non-achieving students won't help anyone. There are a lot of factors why students don't perform well in school, particularly in the math and science fields. But I think the main reason is culture. The under-achieving students haven't had it beaten into them that their education, particularly in science, is invaluable. And while these are often minority students, they are not exclusively so. My grandfather came to this country with a PhD in physics but less than $6.00 in his pocket and no family, but managed to work his way up to solidly middle class with a comfortable life and his kids are in engineering. The idea that education is paramount has been drilled into me from birth and now I'm a graduate physics student and I enjoy doing physics.

So my point is, you must hammer into the psyche of the populace that science and math are not inaccesible and can be quite enjoyable if some hard work is put into study. Not everything is about money and getting the MBA (but yes, increased funding would go a long way to help advance STEM). And even though some companies do probably abuse H1bs, it's not the reason we're lacking and neither is the size of our population (a silly idea in my humble opinion, it's obvious to see why).

So, even thought Tyson makes a weak link between the shooting of Apophis and American science, the point he raises is still a valid one and is a valid concern and requires an honest attempt at a cultural shift as I pointed just mentioned that requires us, especially scientists, to show the population that evolution is fact, the reasons for it, why it's important, and how spectacular learning about it is.

Get an MBA. Half the work, twice the standard of living. If you're smart, do a salary survey and really look at the work conditions of the various career paths. I didn't.

Engineers, and many scientists from what I see, work long hours, get very little respect/recognition, and make a decent salary. Don't expect a door or window to your "office", and expect to be jealous of Dilbert (I'm no kidding).

With an MBA you get lots of recognition (i.e. take credit for what your engineers do), get little blame (i.e. blame all your engineers), and get ~50% more salary despite the omnipresent line of drool on the left side of your mouth. No one bats an eye when you leave for a 3:30 PM tee time either. Best of all your skills are "universal", no need to understand microwave design now that you manage it, you worked for a disk drive manufacturer. Same thing, right?

Seriously, the incentives are pretty fouled up at the moment, and you will kick yourself later if you get into engineering or science for anything but the cerebral self rewards your are occasionally allowed to enjoy (in between schedule related beatings from your MBA wielding overlord).

If this is an English website, there's a lot of foul spelling - looks more like an American if you ask me!

I always used to take the piss out of the Americans not being to speak English correctly. Then a friend of mine who was a Phd student studying the evolution of languages pointed out to me that the way Americans write and pronounce certain words is closer to original English and it is us who can no longer speak our own language the same way as we did when the American forefathers left.

Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.

It is worth noting that there is a Japanese Slashdot run by VA Japan. While we helped them a little in their early days, they essentially run their own content without any real involvement from us... none of us can read Kanji! There are currently no plans to do other language or nation specific Slashdot sites.

While out of all the countries, the US is definitely home to the most readers of this site, the majority of the readers are not US-based. Those are two different things. If you look at the stats on Alexa [alexa.com] you can see that 47.1% of the readers are from the US, while he second place goes to India with a mere 8.8%. That still means that 52.9% of the readers live outside the US though, so the FAQ seems either false or outdated.

are you americans arent able to realize that internet has become a global place still to the extent that you think staggering majority of people here are americans ?

get over yourselves. you are living in a global world and its name is internet.

In this great international global place of no shift keys, do you also not recognize the authority of the direct quote? The we in question is Dr. Tyson (an American) and his fellow countrymen (also Americans).

Nobody ever said the Internet wasn't global. When interpreting pronouns like 'we' in a quote like that posted on slashdot, context matters. The person who constructed the sentence made it very clear that the 'we' pronoun was citizens and residents of the United States. 'We' isn't always a universal that is meant to encompass everyone who reads the text. For example, the U.S. Declaration of Independence was written by the Continental Congress, to be sent both to people within the American Colonies, *AND* to foreign nations (in particular, England). The second paragraph starts "We hold these truths to be self evident. .."

It's obvious that the writers of the Declaration of Independence weren't including all possible readers in the "We", as the King of England and his privy council, as well as the parliament of England, probably didn't hold that view at that time.

'We' is a perfectly useful pronoun, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the way it was used in the quote posted to slashdot. If the article author hadn't made it clear from context who 'we' encompassed, then I might have agreed with your position, but I personally find your argument lacks merit.

No, it is not. Look at China. They operate PURELY as a nation looking out for their own interest. Copenhagen should have told you that. Likewise, we see similar actions in South America. India worked with China, but even they point their finger at China for not working to do what most nations perceive as being in global interest. Brazil and nations like Veneuela point their finger at America and say that we did not do enough. Yet, we offered up large conncessions and said that we would go further if CHina w

it is undeniable that internet sprung up from arpanet, however its progress has been global. if you are not aware, the entire www thing was from switzerland. which kinda basically forms the majority of interactions on the net.

this nightmare started in 1980 with reagan and has continued ever since. Poppa Bush tried to give it more funding, but Clinton did little and W out and out destroyed it. It remains to be seen what Obama really will do, but it does not look all that good.

We spending money proving Global Warming but change it to Climate Change. Still not a lot of scientifically sound evidence that we are in a man-made cycle with irreversible conditions. Ironically, we are only releasing carbon from fossil fuels that was once in plants, which was once in the air, which is where we are putting it. Not sure that, given the planet earth is a closed system in terms of matter conservation, we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.

But we spend more money on social engineering than we do on real engineering or research. I think if the government gave up on all research it would be beneficial. Virgin is doing more with space technology than NASA is. And making money at it.

All government funded research does is take money away from people who want to spend it in some other manner and apply it towards projects that may not have any realizable benefit that's being run by people who are better at pitching funding proposals than delivering results.

Here's food for thought. Polywell fusion has amazing potential as a viable energy source. Government funding consists of $500,000 from the US Navy and run by a private company. The researchers are not Government employees. With some Venture Capital they could be running this project with billions of capital investments.

UAV technology is at a complete standstill in this country -- unless you work for the USAF. FAA regulations are so retarded you can't consider ever deploying UAV on US territories. But Australia and Korea are kicking butt on this research outside of military applications because they have commercially viable potential.

We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.

In an odd coincidence, when those plants were growing with all that carbon dioxide in the air, it was a lot hotter than it is now! Obviously that warming wasn't man made so this must not be either, right?

You state we spend money "proving" global warming. Let's assume you're right - how much is that exactly?

According to the GAO [gao.gov], it's probably around 6 billion a year. Which is about two weeks in Iraq.

Not sure that... we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.

Yes, we are burning hundreds of millions of years worth of old biomass in less than 150. We're also destroying every old growth forest on the planet. I'm fairly sure these are new events. And even a closed system will have periods of self-regulation that could be very inhospitable to our way of life.

Virgin is doing more with space technology than NASA is. And making money at it.

Virgin is not making money. Virgin has not been to the moon. Virgin hasn't ever placed a satellite. Virgin has never even orbited the earth as the space shuttle has. Virgin has never docked with a space station, or built one. It's performing sub-orbital flights - whoopdedoo!

All government funded research does is take money away from people who want to spend it in some other manner and apply it towards projects that may not have any realizable benefit that's being run by people who are better at pitching funding proposals than delivering results.

If this is true, why are all technologically advanced civilizations run by a strong state government? And I guess rocket technology, information technology, satellites, and every other major advance of the 20th century funded directly by government research have netted us very little.

Here's food for thought. Polywell fusion has amazing potential as a viable energy source. Government funding consists of $500,000 from the US Navy and run by a private company. The researchers are not Government employees. With some Venture Capital they could be running this project with billions of capital investments

I thought you just said government funding was the problem? Would polywell reactors had a chance at private capital investment in the 1980s, so it could develop to the point where it may be viable? Or are you just unable to form a coherent argument if you're allowed to write more than a few sentences?

I agree that there need to be more reasonable restrictions for research and development, but that's more of a function of bad governance than private initiative. All of the programs in Australia and South Korea are sponsored by their federal governments.

We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.

Commercial R&D is just like commerce itself. Incredibly short sighted and hamstrung by the requirement of quick return on investment. That's why pure R&D does not exist in the commercial realm, especially since the closure of Bell Labs. Modern corporations are so greedy, they are only allowed by their shareholders to perform product development. Anything that has a good chance of losing money - like pure research and development - is never even put on the table.

Ironically, we are only releasing carbon from fossil fuels that was once in plants, which was once in the air, which is where we are putting it. Not sure that, given the planet earth is a closed system in terms of matter conservation, we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.

Ironically, you would not be living well in a Earth habitat that existed 1,000,000s of years ago. Just because the Earth once was does not mean that Humankind once was. Humankind has not been around as long as the Earth and there were many, many environments that the Earth has had.

We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.

Hey, stupid, corporate taxes have gone down since the 1980's. But yet, the number of research labs run by corporations has gone down precipitously in that time. Why? I'll give you a hint - it has nothing to do with the amount of government expenditures. It has a lot to do with the fact that corporations don't see immediate profit in research and have closed down their labs. And, in fact, the government has actually subsidized corporate R&D since that time by giving R&D tax credits. So are you just ignoring facts, or what?

First off I am a frequent lurker of the Polywell community and if you are being intellectuallyhonest you know darn well that the potential device has only a slim chance of beingbetter than ITER. The lack of funds is one thing true, the other is the performance of science(in this case fusion) without a proper amount of community (yes boring democratic government)peer review so that in 30 years on the most basic assumptions have yet to be verified.

Secondly were "climate change" false or a scam there would be zero reason to develop Polywellsince this country has ample coal reserves -- enough to last 100's of years.

Thirdly I have been long been an academic researcher, now am in industry and I will tell youthat nothing innovative in science comes except from government funding. The halcyondays of Bell Labs funding astronomy are long gone. There is a difference between scienceand technology.

Capitalism, as practiced worldwide has advantages in terms of efficiency, but few in terms of"the vision thing".

Surely you jest. I'm against the use of UAVs, period. You seriously want some automated plane firing missiles at suspected "terrorists" in America? Or anywhere, for that matter? Where innocent people will be killed? Let's hope UAVs remain at a standstill in this country. We've got enough problems with Homeland Insecurity going nuts with every "boo" the so-called "terrorists" do.

surely you realize that, while all UCAVs are UAVs, not all UAVs are UCAVs.

This decline has been going on much longer than any war on terror. This is a problem on a wide social level that has no single cause and no single solution. The sooner people stop using this problem to push their own political agenda the sooner we can get down to solving it.

What distresses me most about this AP story is not the asteroid itself, but that a space-faring nation (not us -- not the U.S.) has decided to take the lead on an important space mission and, as a courtesy, asked if we want to join them. But isn't that what we used to do for other countries?

Meanwhile, the Large Hadron Collider, a primarily European, international collaboration at CERN in Switzerland, now probes states of matter beyond all previous experimental limits previously probed by American labs.

There is certainly a big "culture of entitlement" in the U.S. that has largely replaced individualism and a good work ethic. When you have a lot of people wanting something for nothing and only a small number of hard-working people to leech off of to get that something for nothing, are you surprised that the country is collapsing?

The introduction of the welfare state in the Nordic countries greatly boosted their economies. Blaming America's problems on a desire for some government solutions is an oversimplification that obscures more than it clarifies.